On Thu, 11 Mar 2010, Marv Gandall wrote:
> Anyone see any redeeming qualities in the film?
As an action film, it's kind of uniquely great. It's 2 hours of constant adrenalin without anything cartoonish about it. The hero doesn't have unbelievable powers. There is no evil villain. There is no preposterous plot. There is barely any plot at all, kind of like an art film. And yet the action is constantly involving and firing you up.
So on that level -- compared with movies like Die Hard 4 -- it's not only satisfying to watch, it's satisfying to watch in a way that feels slightly new, slightly more grown up. It's an action film about an adrenalin junkie rather than a superhero.
As a war movie, it's maybe the 3rd of 4th best war movie of 2009, way behind _Lebanon_ and _The Fixer_, and probably others I've forgotten. It has no real relation to Iraq. It just uses it as a setting, like you might use the French revolution. Actually a better comparison might be a cowboy movie. The relation of the bomb squad to Iraq is very much the relation of a squad of cowboys on a mission in Indian country with shadowy hostiles everywhere and dubious friendlies near at hand.
If you consider that sort of abstraction in itself a conservative move (which is perfectly fair), then it's conservative. But then so are virtually all action movies. Pure action always abstracts. It's not a matter of its content so much as its lack of content. If anything, this is slightly less conservative than the average action movie, because it doesn't end with a hero saving the world from evil.
Actually, now that I think of it, if one insists on assigning it a perspective, it seems more a liberal than a conservative movie. If the left view is that the US army is a force for evil; and the conservative view is that the war is a success and the people love us; the liberal view is about an army of ambiguous virtue toiling against evil in ambiguous circumstances with ambiguous success. That's the "serious" liberal worldview in a nutshell. And also that of the revisionist Western.
I don't think it's a very important movie. I very much enjoyed watching it, and I think it's a interesting innovation in action movies, comparable to, and more successful than, Ang Lee's Hulk. But probably about as memorable.
Michael